One person

This edition is presented on the occasion of the LEAF2021, in an ultramarine cardboard box. Nine series of eight colored paper appear, reproducing sixteen headlines from nine different news website, exactly like they were on April, 1st, 2021 : Le Monde, Repubblica, Correio da Manha, De Telegraaf, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, The Guardian, La Libre Belgique, De Standaard, New York Times. The first of April is of course April Fool’s day (a tradition happily engaged by the press every year, at least in the countries where it’s a tradition, which is the case with the selected national medias). Thus, the game is to identity, in each series of sixteen titles, which one must be scatterbrained. Not an easy game in 2021!

Exhibition's views : Regular Studio

During 2020, three issues of a publication called Serendipity are published by the art center Eté 78 in Brussels. Every issue starts from an episode of the year 1978. It is given to the participating artists as an inspiration. The issue number 3 is based on the death of the Count Georges Moens de Fernig, on the 16th of August, 1978, a person who played a crucial role in the World Fair of 1958, in Brussels. The work conceived in reaction to this context of creation is a text, titled "Hors d'oeuvre" (a word play in French simultaneously meaning "out of the regular work" and evoking a special dish, given to prestigious guests). Coming together with a photograph of the art center Eté78, taken during a night in August 2020. The text mimicks an highly rational analysis of the constraints of the creation engaged in this project, in its time. It draws the portrait of a mind in search of meaning and logic, who tries to materialize his discomfort under the form of a tangible object, difficult to represent, except perhaps through the metaphorical image of a crushed piece of white porcelain clay, ectoplasm inhabiting his psyche. At the end of the editorial project, an exhibition is inaugurated where the piece of clay is offered, in real to the admiration of the public. Is it a bone, a relic from the Count? Is it a piece of the Holy Cross? Or a representation of our physical existence, in our highly solitary and digital time? 

Images from exhibition : Regular Studios

Just before the exhibition called "Support Act : La clé des champs" (Botanique, Bruxelles, 20.02-29.03.2020), a poster and an invitation card are edited. The invitation card is a photograph of the business quartes of Brussels, in the North, taken at night from the bridge near the Botanique, which cross the speedway that surround the city center. Where you only see a few city lights, and commercial signs... On this printed base, an action is realised. The 2000 invitations sent through snail mail are all perforated by hand, creating small holes with animals and plants, suddenly propelled into the urban landscape. The poster shows the leftovers of some of these perforations, in a simple hand : rabbits, bumping into each other, on top of each other... 

The belgian collector and art historian Christophe Veys conducts an editorial project called Protocole/Protocol since a few years. The principle of this publication resides in a demand made to various artists to propose the idea of an artwork, to be realised not by the artist but by the buyer of each edition (which comes as a standard certificate, designed by the graphic design studio Valley the Valley). Instead of following the demanded conceptual form, the resulting creation here consists of a combination of different printing interventions on each of the 30 paper copies of the standard certificate. In place of a recommandation to “make something”, comes a text in two paragraphs, putted under the sign of an observation of the world and its details, of lived situations. On the reverse, a photography, always different, is printed as well. The 30 different variations of the edition form together a kind of fragmented novel. Thus the “work to be done” is rather expressed in the sharing of an observation, than a making of an object or an action. The choice of an edition, by an eventual buyer, must be done randomly, as if to let chance add its own personal suggestion. The implicit authority embodied in the protocole by the artist, asking somebody to do something, is also diluted through another letters play: each copy is signed with 30 different variations of the name and surname Yoann Van Parys, inventing as much imaginary artists.

Alongside the exhibition « De l’assemblée à l’imprimante » presented in autumn 2016 at the Institut Supérieur pour l’Etude du Langage Plastique in Brussels, comes the first issue of a magazine named Patch, destinated to accompany the new vision and program of the new director. The contributions are two texts (an intro and an outro, mimicking the discourse of a political person having to introduce an art exhibition), Comics pages (in a loose filiation with Ad Reinhardt). But also combined pages mixing positivist ads on the theme of contemporary art, selfportraits requested to each person working at the art center, scannings of their personnal handwritten notes, archival images of the art center, contemporary photographs of the team of the art center at work and quotes from a Joseph Kosuth’s work made specifically for the place many years ago, that the artist decide to later disown.

In December 2016, after budget cuts in the cultural sector in Flanders, the art center Lokaal01, active for years between Antwerp in Belgium and Breda in the Netherlands is forced to close its second Belgian location, after being forced to close its first location in Breda a few years earlier, for similar reasons. This place welcomed many artists through the years, under the brilliant though modest direction of the curator and artist Frederik Vergaert. To conclude the adventure, a “manual” is edited, comprising specific creations of several artists. Some of the artists are invited to intervene both inside the book, and on the book, after printing. The proposal here is a text called “Zero et un” (Zero and one) dedicated to artists friends who exhibited there, which reading is perturbated by black and white drawings. In front of this text is an empty page. The intervention on the printed book consists of printings, in silkscreen, of drawings on the cover of 42 copies of the manual : the number of copies that one can transport in train from Antwerp to Brussels, and back. As if to establish a scale of action, as if to underline the modest margin of movement a single individual is able to have.